Create Fast & Easy Weekly SEO Reports

Whether you manage the SEO internally for a company or for multiple clients, you will be expected to demonstrate improvements being made, the impact on business and, potentially, the return on investment (ROI).

So, what is the best way to do this? By conducting SEO weekly reporting of course!

But where do you begin?

Every report is unique and specific to individual clients or companies and creating a report will be dependent on a number of variables:

objectives

targets

reporting tools used to obtain data

Luckily this guide will help you to create kickass weekly SEO reports fast and easy.

Building the Foundations of your SEO Report

The foundations of any report will be your preferred standard format.

Whether you prefer to use a spreadsheet or document we suggest creating a template that is branded accordingly and has key headings.

Creating a template will help you to:

Keep your reporting consistent

Report on the same metrics throughout your SEO weekly reporting

Demonstrate progress and impact

A good template may look like this. It includes branding, the report title and the date that it was generated.

Once you’ve perfected your template you can use this for all of your future SEO weekly reporting needs simply by changing the client name and the date it was generated.

What to include

What to include in your weekly reports will be dependent on the previously agreed objectives or KPIs. For example, you may be concentrating on rank position or getting more people to download specific content, or even driving more traffic to a particular page. However, we believe that a kickass SEO report should include the following key metrics to evaluate the full range of SEO tasks being executed. These can be elaborated or amended to reflect specific projects.

1. Overview

Your overview should be specific to the project/client and is a great way of reminding your client of the objectives that you are working towards. Your overview should, therefore, include time scales, exact benchmarks and progress to date. So, for example, if one of your aims is to build 100 high-quality links then show how many links you’ve built to day, and how many you have left to build.

2. Keywords

The performance of your keywords is probably one of the most vital aspects of your weekly SEO report. Provide a list of the keywords you’re tracking and if possible, show the position of where your site ranks for each specific keyword. You could also present this alongside your competitors rank position and indicate any movement in position from the previous week. WooRank’s Keyword Tool allows you to easily track up to 3 competitors against your keywords and displays both rank and monthly search volume.

If your report flags lost positions or no improvement in rank for specific keywords then you may want to create a specific action like investigating the difficulty to rank for this keyword or maybe you need to examine the backlink profile of your competitors. KWFinder is a great tool for this.

3. Backlinks

Link building is vital to improving your site’s rank position and therefore greatly impacts both visibility and traffic. Providing an overview of a site’s backlinks is paramount in any SEO report. Ideally, your report should include the following:

Number of links

Referring domains

Source URL

Landing Page URL

Backlink quality

Number of sessions generated from each backlink

Anchor text

Competitors’ backlink quality

This will also help you to track old backlinks to ensure that the backlink pages haven’t deteriorated.

4. Work Completed

There are many on-page aspects or technical site issues that you may have worked on throughout the week. So if you have changed page titles, resolved canonical issues, or optimized mobile speed report it!

It is also a good idea to explain the possible impact of making such changes; like a potential surge in page visits, which brings us nicely onto our next section….

5. Web traffic

This is your chance to prove the impact of your efforts. Use Google Analytics (GA) to show improvement in web traffic, bounce rate and acquisition – more specifically, show how these can be attributed to the work you have done and benchmark progress against both the previous weeks and from the initial period of when you commenced work on the site.

6. Specific goals

If there are key goals that you are aiming for – increasing the number of the downloads or driving traffic to a ‘sign up’ page, then use GA to measure these goals and conversions. Setting a monetary attribute to a particular goal is also a nice way of showing revenue gained against their investments in your services.

7. Next Stages

As a result of executing your weekly SEO report, you should have been able to identify some next steps or areas of focus for the following week. This is particularly important if something unexpected has cropped up, like a drop in visits or you’ve achieved fewer conversions than expected. This is a fantastic opportunity to show your ability to identify problems, attribute these to specific causes and outline how to resolve these fluctuations.

How to make Dedicated Reports for Campaigns

Just like each page should have a specific use, your SEO reports should also have defined purposes. So far, we've only discussed reports for overall performance but you need more detailed reports for specific initiatives.

Check out this guide to getting your SEO campaign reports set up in a way that will make your life better.